I asked Chad if he would give us the lowdown on the applications he relies upon as a designer and blogger on a daily basis.

The Intro…

I currently am running a 15″UniBody Macbook Pro with 4 Gigs of Ram running the beautiful Snow Leopard. This is my second Macbook Pro. I love them to death. I love the portability and power. Hopefully soon I will be ponying up on a 24″LCD from apple to accompany it on my desktop.

I use spotlight to quick launch apps and I am constantly changing the look of my dock be it icons or what is there. I also heavily use the menubar. The more stuff I can have up there the better. I use fluidapp to make apps for all kinds of normal webpages that I access & since I am the Editor for FuelYourApps I constantly have new apps that I am tinkering with.

My dock is basically setup for the bare minimum stuff I use everyday. I am huge fan of Candybar (not in my dock because I quicklaunch it). I am not sure how often I change my icons buts its pretty frequent, as is changing my background. However the Flurry icons from Iconfactory (what you see here) I have rested on for a few days and I have come to love them.

Mail – This wrangles all of my personal accounts and is running the nice little add-on Letterbox.

Things – I couldn’t do anything without this. I was skeptical at first but…. having an iPhone and trying to keep organized on many different things everyday this makes my life a ton easier.

Helvetireader – I changed the icon so it would match. Basically, its Google Reader run through Fluid App with a Helvetireader user style.

Firefox – My primary browser. I use this because I have add-ons out the wazoo and ton of quick favicon links on the bar of the app. I use Safari too, don’t hate. I just quick launch it like the rest.

Photoshop, Illustrator, In-Design – I use these daily for work, for play, for my stuff whatever. These three are always open from 9am on. I have the rest of the Adobe Suite but, you guessed it. I quicklaunch.

Coda – Its floating in my dock right now. Its actually the trial (GASP WHAT?!?) I can’t decide if I like it or TextMate more so I am not sure what I am pulling the trigger on. Suggestions?

Entourage – I know. Bad. Bad program. However, work uses exchange so I use Entourage from 8:30-5 ONLY!

Tweetie – What?!? No Tweetdeck? I have tweetdeck but it hogs a ton of ram. I usually am using that ram on some other big files or something in Adobe so I took the beautiful UI of tweetie and its slim-line profile vs. Tweetdecks huge footprint.

Stacks – I have stacks setup for downloads, documents and servers. I have them all setup like the new Snow Leopard scrolling grid feature. Its pretty wicked and helps me find things with ease, especially at work (servers).

The Menubar…

Mail Unread Menu – This gives me a sneak peak at how many unread I have. Horrible for productivity and inbox zero but, it lets me know if something is blowing up or not.

Bowtie – This little app is amazing. I love it. Shows my album art on my desktop (muse album attached you can show or not) and also updates my Scrobbling over at Last.fm

Tweetie - I wish tweetie ran from just the menubar. I like it up there and rarely ever click the dock icon except to launch it.

Littlesnapper – I could not make it one day without this app. I use this app to house all my inspiration because it does such a phenomenal job. Huge shout-out to the guys over at Real Mac Software for making an amazing product.

Fan Controller – Gotta keep the temps down when running some big files. I have found the MBP is more stable when I control the fan myself. So, I do.

Random System Monitoring Tools – The rest are a mix of iStat and some stock Apple Icons.

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A huge thanks to Chad for taking time out to take part in the Dock Series.

As usual if you would like to share your dock, just leave a comment with a brief description of your dock apps and a link to a screenshot of it. Or take to your blog and write up a description of your dock as several others have done.

4 Comments

I’d definitely go for Coda. Think their way of handling clips, tab triggers, books and the posibility of having plugins in one light program is just awesome.

Have to admit I’ve never been a big fan of TextMate tho. Simply loving the very simple Mac appealing UI of Coda. I only use TextMate when I have to convert a bunch of text from capitalized into lowercase. Du’h. x(

It is useful! I have gone with Espresso. Its a beautiful little app and the workflow is amazing. Time Van Damme gave me a tip off to it and I think that made up my mind. Coda is good, I just think Espresso works better for me.

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Grace Smith is a seasoned Freelance Web Designer, based in Northern Ireland. She has been featured in numerous online and print publications and is a featured writer for Mashable, one of the largest Tech and Social News sites in the world. She has also been named one of the Top 50 Female Designers in the world.

Grace is the hired gun behind Postscript5; a small, boutique web design studio based in Northern Ireland. She has 6+ years experience in the design industry, and has worked with corporations and entrepreneurs, as well as small local startups and businesses.